A two-channel video installation, exploring the body as a sculptural object in relationship to power, architecture,, and the material conditions of lived experience.

Exhibition Statement

Jennifer Locke’s Passing Through is a two-channel video installation, projected on opposing walls of the gallery, exploring the body as a sculptural object in relationship to power, architecture, and the material conditions of lived experience.

At the outset of the video, one side of the installation presents the minimalist, neutral plane of a white wall, while the other shows the wooden studs and unpainted drywall on the other side. The artist enters the frame with the white wall and begins hitting it repeatedly with a hammer, connecting the two sides of the installation, and ultimately busting a hole in the wall big enough for her to climb through to the other side.

The piece is a study in embodied phenomenology, exploring how the artist’s physical intervention in the architectural space affects her and the viewer’s respective positions.  She follows strict guidelines, working within clearly defined limits, and distilling experience to a basic set of parameters.  She highlights the embodied nature of seeing and the play of presence and absence in the constitution of experience. Withdrawing from one frame and emerging in the other, she performs the fort-da of coming to be and passing away, juxtaposing foreground and background, and highlighting the structures underlying architectural space. 

Indeed, drawing on her experience as a dominatrix, jiu-jitsu wrestler, and artist model, Locke presents the visual field as the result of a power struggle, between the embodied subject and its enveloping conditions, rife with blood, sweat, and tears.  The piece is violent and intense.  She presents architecture and spectatorship as forms of disciplining the body, positioning the subject in space and directing her view.  She collides with the walls around her, struggling to re-position herself in the world, to disrupt and even ultimately to transcend her surroundings.

• Clark Buckner

Artist Bio

Jennifer Locke received a B.F.A. (1991) and M.F.A. (2006) from the San Francisco Art Institute. She lives and works in San Francisco. Her numerous solo and two exhibitions include: Grant Wahlquist Gallery; the Berkeley Art Museum; Rocksbox Fine Art, Portland, Oregon and Pontiac, Michigan; Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions; Queen’s Nails Projects, San Francisco; Hallwalls, Buffalo; Southern Exposure, San Francisco; and Kiki Gallery, San Francisco. Her work has also been featured in group exhibitions at venues including: the Berkeley Art Museum; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; the Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach; the Havana Biennial; the Venice Biennale; the Busan International Video Festival, Korea; New Langton Arts, San Francisco; La Panaderia, Mexico; Kunsthalle Basel; Et al, San Francisco; Canada, New York; and Air de Paris, Paris. She was thrice nominated for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s SECA Award and is the recipient of a Fleishhacker Eureka Fellowship. Her work is in the collection of the Kadist Art Foundation.